Out of the Bronx, a Savvy Cinematic Vision

A Tribute to Abel Ferrara's Fitful Films

By

Bruce Bennett

Updated Jan. 5, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

"When you're in a movie theater, that film is going through the projector gate chicka, chicka, chicka, like 24 frames per second," the filmmaker Abel Ferrara said recently over espresso and bottled water in Little Italy. "Stops, goes, stops, goes, right? Between those frames is a little bit of black. At the end of an hour-and-a-half film, that audience is sitting in the dark for 18 minutes."

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Bronx-born filmmaker Abel Ferrara, right, will be feted this week at Anthology Film Archives.
Associated Press

The defect in perception that makes it possible to ignore the darkness is called "persistence of vision," and it's a term that could as easily be applied to Mr. Ferrara's career in film. For nearly 40 years, the Bronx-born creator of such paradigmatic city-set films as "King of New York," "The Addiction," "Bad Lieutenant" and "Ms. 45" has hop-scotched from Manhattan to Hollywood to Europe in order to realize features, documentaries, episodic television shows and shorts that expose the obsessive heart of human nature and urban life with emotional acuteness and gritty cinematic savvy.

Beginning Friday, Anthology Film Archives will present "Abel Ferrara in the 21st Century," a five-film retrospective comprising two fiction features and three documentaries, all made since 2005. Even as filmmakers, critics, agents and journalists gear up for the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this month, "Abel Ferrara in the 21st Century" may present January's single most potent dose of uncompromising independent movie-making anywhere.

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Included in the five-film series are the 2008 documentary 'Chelsea on the Rocks,' above, which re-enacts the death of Nancy Spungen.
Everett Collection

Although 2005's "Mary," 2007's "Go Go Tales" (a New York Film Festival selection) and 2009's bracing Neapolitan prison docudrama "Napoli, Napoli, Napoli" were all made in Italy, substantial portions of "Mary" and all of "Go Go Tales" take place in a Manhattan re-created at Rome's legendary Cinecittà Studios. And Mr. Ferrara's pair of nonfiction films from 2009—"Mulberry St.," a whirlwind dissection of the annual Feast Of San Gennaro, and the Chelsea Hotel documentary "Chelsea on the Rocks"—were, the director said, created simultaneously on trips between Rome and New York.

"We shot this, came back and shot that, producers ran out of money..." Mr. Ferrara, 59, said. "There is no timeline, you know what I mean?"

"Chelsea on the Rocks" contains a dramatic re-enactment of the notorious death of Nancy Spungen, supposedly at the hands of Sex Pistol bassist Sid Vicious, along with talking-head interviews with hotel residents and visitors. Mr. Ferrara said that the Spungen-Vicious episode, re-created onscreen and obliquely recalled by the late actor and comedian Rockets Redglare, then a member of Vicious's entourage, "almost overpowered the film in a way."

Prior to shooting "Chelsea on the Rocks," Mr. Ferrara said, he had a general idea of Spungen's murder being the same drug-addled accidental homicide depicted in Alex Cox's 1986 biopic "Sid and Nancy." Behind closed doors in the Chelsea, however, he was told otherwise. "These people are all telling me, 'Well, everybody knows that Sid didn't kill Nancy,'" Mr. Ferrara remembered. "I said, 'Everybody doesn't know that. I don't know that!'"

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2007's 'Go Go Tales,' above, will also be included in the series.
Anthology Film Archives

The scenario that Mr. Ferrara believes is closer to the truth begins with Vicious's ultimately ironic recording of a Frank Sinatra standard. "He got paid $25,000 for singing 'My Way'," Mr. Ferrara said. "They cashed the check the day before [the murder]. That money was never found. In my version, Sid was knocked out on downers, waiting for Rockets to come back with some dope, and Nancy was with a drug dealer who's now supposedly a substitute English teacher in Jersey."

So the drug dealer did it? "Who wants to out somebody for that now?" the director demurred.

These days, solidly back in New York to stay, Mr. Ferrara is sanguine about possible upcoming projects, including a prequel to "King of New York," a web series based on the infamous New York Pizza Connection Heroin case, and a city-set relationship forensic unfolding on the eve of the apocalypse. He's equally philosophical about a fruitless three-year struggle to realize a modern version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

"You alone have to control how you spend the money, what you do with the money," he said. "The difference between the films that mean something and the films that mean nothing is simply that. I mean, in L.A. these days? Those films are made how? Normal film is like some groupthink, group therapy. Who the f--- is going to spend $14 on that?"

The filmmaker was particularly bemused about the nearly ubiquitous studio practice of using focus-group screenings to shape material—a process he was forced to endure by the producers of a studio-financed 1993 take on "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Asked what he had taken away from survey cards collected from a young San Fernando multiplex audience, Mr. Ferrara merely passed along what he'd read. "I said, 'I learned that there's 48 different ways of spelling suspense," he recalled." These kids were putting down like 'suzpenz' 'sahspense,' you know? I told them, 'Somebody needs to teach these kids that suspense isn't two words.'"

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